The Digital Government Society (DGS) announces the 18th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research - dg.o 2017, with the theme “Innovations and Transformations in Government." The dg.o 2017 conference will be hosted by the City University of New York, College of Staten Island Campus, NY, June 7-- 9, 2017.

The dg.o conference is an established forum for presentation, discussion, and demonstration of interdisciplinary research on digital government, political participation, civic engagement, and the impact of technology and innovation on government and governance. Each year the conference brings together scholars recognized for the interdisciplinary and innovative nature of their work, their contributions to theory (rigor) and practice (relevance), and their focus on important and timely topics. The conference program combines:

Keynote and track presentations and discussions on new research on digital government at the intersections of information technology research, social and behavioral science research, and the challenges and missions of government.

Presentations of effective partnerships and collaborations among government professionals and agencies, university researchers, relevant businesses, and NGOs, as well as grassroots citizen groups, to advance the practice of digital government.

A showcase of digital government projects, implementations, and initiatives that bring together the research and practitioner communities, demonstrate the effectiveness and/or challenges of digital government and offer best practices.

JOINT EVENT WITH INTELLIGENT COMMUNITY FORUM

Two global communities, the Digital Government Society (DGS) and the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), will partner in June 2017 to build new bridges between research and practice, with a shared goal of creating new interdisciplinary, multi-sector partnerships within the world’s communities focused on innovation. Both DGS and the ICF have convened respective communities in cities all around the world. This year they are bringing their communities together in New York to share knowledge, allow each group to network at a deeper level and explore new partnerships to advance urban and rural innovation.

On June 7, 2017, the DGS and ICF’s representatives will host the joint program at the City University of New York Staten Island campus for the ICF’s annual Summit and the dg.o conference. For one day, members of both communities will present a set of joint and complementary sessions that provide attendees with a chance to hear from global leaders from across the world’s leading regions, cities and towns. Attendees will participate in master classes and workshops, and seek to build collaborations focused on advancing the scholarship, policy and practice of urban and rural innovation. The capstone of the collaboration of these two communities will be the announcement of the world’s Top7 intelligent communities at a joint reception in Manhattan on the evening of June 7th.

THEMES AND TRACK TOPICS

The 18th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research will feature the main theme of Innovations and Transformations in Government. Technological advances, such as big data and collective intelligence, together with policy innovations including open government, open data, and the creation of new public data labs have been a catalyst for disruptive innovations in government, causing radical re-thinking of the traditional assumptions and expectations regarding how governments should function. Public goods and services once considered exclusively the responsibility of government agencies are now often initiated and produced through collaborations with citizens, non-profits, and/or private sector partners.

The conference theme will highlight challenges and solutions in harnessing innovations and transformations in government. Innovative designs in all aspects of government, including people, services, data, policy, governance, collaboration, and democracy, require leadership talent, creative ideas and implementation strategies, and clear success criteria for evaluating solutions. We welcome research and practice contributions from around the world on the topics including but not limited to innovation strategies, policy innovations, citizen services, engagement innovations, and data-driven decision innovations that address various current societal, environmental and economic challenges, across all the eight tracks below.

Each track will accept full research papers as well as research in progress, management case studies and policy papers. Panel, tutorial, workshop, poster and demonstration proposals are also invited. Each conference element has co-chairs who are responsible for managing the submission and review process for their track. Feel free to contact track chairs for guidance as necessary.

The use of social media has been growing rapidly and globally. Governments at all levels have been using microblogs, such as Twitter, and social network sites, such as Facebook, among other platforms and tools for public administration and outreach to citizens. Citizens, businesses and voluntary associations have been using these tools and affordances to share information, ask questions, and compete or collaborate on problem solving within and among neighborhoods, industries, states, and nations. The growing use of social media has created new challenges and opportunities for many users such as changes in regulations and policies, marketing, highly diverse perspectives, and feedback. Analysis of communication behavior, messages, and systems and institutions, should contribute to our knowledge of the ways these media are affecting collective problem solving and public policy development. Future trends in social media and government point to new synergies, as well as disruptions, among public agencies and users. This track welcomes research and practice papers addressing a range of similar or related topics on social media analysis on content, metrics, case studies or theoretical models to advance this area of research.

Public organizations employ information and communication technologies (ICT) to facilitate communication and transactions with many stakeholders in public and private sectors. The adoption and implementation of new ICT by public organizations is influenced by organizational factors such as the availability of resources (i.e. funding, technological knowledge, and personnel), leadership, trust, organization’s technological culture, as well as inter-organizational dynamics. Similarly, the adoption of ICT in government and society has generated important impacts on the organizational effectiveness, efficiency, and innovativeness of public organizations. This track solicits research that examines the organizational factors that influence the adoption and implementation of new ICT as well as the impact of new ICT. Research papers in this track examine the adoption, use, and organizational impacts of a variety of innovative technologies and policies or practices that include but are not limited to social media, citizen-centric technologies, virtual collaboration, open data, big data, and modeling tools.

Track 3. Opening Government: From Open Data Infrastructures to Collaboration

Governments are utilizing the Internet to achieve an open, transparent and accountable government while providing responsive services. This extensive transformation is required both within the government and in the way governments engage with the public. The opening and sharing of data, the deployment of tools and instruments to engage the public, collaboration amongst public organizations and between governments and the public are important drivers for realizing these goals. Governments initiate open data portals, develop apps, and open more data to engage with the public to create more value. To successfully achieve this vision, fundamental changes in practice and new research on governments as open systems are needed. Successful cases, measurement instruments, information sharing, adoption, stakeholder analysis and theoretical models and frameworks are necessary to advance this field. In particular, this track solicits papers addressing the issue of public sector transformation achieved through open government, collaboration amongst actors and information sharing within and between public and private organizations.

The slogan &quot;Smart Cities, Smart Citizens, Smart Governments” refers to the promise of using linked and intertwined technologies to create innovative and intelligent solutions to life in a city that will result not only in operational efficiency, but also in government transformation through co-creative governance. Topics for this track include but are not limited to: Applications and collaborations based on the “internet of things”; Smart sensors; Big data analytics; The Civic Technology Movement, and Intercity and intergovernmental collaborations; Intelligent solutions for cities and governments. Descriptions of research and development efforts that demonstrate advances in technology and/or policy innovations in the areas of energy, transportation, health, education, public safety, structures, natural environment, and business, are all welcome, as are related issues of cybersecurity and privacy, community-based infrastructure resilience, urban informatics and governance.

Increasing threats of domestic and international cyber-attacks, and growing dependencies on inter-connected cyberspace, require a need for national and global collaborations to develop secure and resilient cyber infrastructure. This track focuses on technical, policy and social dimensions of cyber security research, including theoretical and empirical models and frameworks, to address ever-expanding cyber security challenges. Topics include but not limited to: information security in e-government, cybercrimes, cyber incident response, critical infrastructure protection, national and global information sharing, surveillance and privacy, cryptography policy governance, security governance and strategies, civil engagement and public awareness. We also invite domain-specific cases and innovative approaches on security challenges, cybernational defence, private/public joint efforts, and education, such as workforce training and retention.

The Beyond Bureaucracy track aims to outline and discuss challenges along the boundaries of society, technology, and governance, which reach beyond established e-governance research paths and priorities. Where well-established e-government / e-governance research ambitions focus on providing and/or studying technology that supports the work and mission of government agencies and governmental agents (incremental innovation), Beyond Bureaucracy addresses the question how radical technological innovation transforms the power of citizens and the conceptual sovereign body to actively control (rather than passively observe and follow) government agencies and governmental agents. The Beyond Bureaucracy track invites contributions that discuss pending technological (design science) challenges, promotes the economic potentials of disruptive new technological ecosystems, and serves as a platform for pro/con deliberations on Beyond Bureaucracy thought and knowledge. Research keywords includes but not limited to: Liquid Democracy, Informating Governance, e-Anarchy, Participatory Budgeting & Bottom-Up Excise, Non-Bureaucratic Government, etc.(further details: http://dgo17.beyondbureaucracy.org)

E-participation comprises the use of information and communication technologies to broaden and deepen political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another and with their elected representatives. It can lead to new methods of producing public policies and services that contrast with transaction-based methods of service delivery, in which citizens consume public services solely conceived and provided by governments. In the novel coproduction-based approaches, citizens are not only consulted but are part of the conception, design, steering, and management of public policies and services. Hence, this track focuses one-participation approaches that instrument Participatory Democracy, supporting cooperation among citizens and governments on regular basis. Its major topics will discuss strategies, methods, techniques and tools that can contribute to the coproduction of public services.

A growing body of literature has been focused on the benefits, motivations, as well as best practices to adopt open data in government sectors. Many theorizing efforts regard institutional structures as critical barriers to promote open innovation paradigm in public sector. In this track, we discuss the impact and change of these institutional structures by inviting research papers that examine open data initiatives as either government policies or politics. The policy lens critically analyses the policy documents and reveals how open data policies are drafted, interpreted, and implemented in a specific context. The politics lens is mainly concerned with the power relations between the state, civil society, and business. It leads to a critical reflection on the agenda of open data movement in the context of power structures of informational capitalism. Therefore, we particularly welcome the content and discourse analysis of open data documents, and the storytelling of government-business collaboration in open data innovations.

Panel proposals may address themes or topics related to any of the tracks for the conference. Additionally, we welcome panel proposals that put a spotlight on practice and application. Proposals from practitioners at all levels of government featuring experiences with, perspectives on, and evaluations of digital government practice are encouraged. Individuals interested in submitting panel proposals are invited to consult the panel co-chairs about their ideas prior to developing their submissions. Please send expressions of interest for panel development to Teresa Harrison (tharrison@albany.edu) and Richard Flanagan (Richard.Flanagan@csi.cuny.edu).

Poster and Demonstration

Poster and Demo Chair:Kellyton dos Santos Brito and Murray Scott

The poster session, held in conjunction with the system demonstrations, allows presenters to discuss research in progress, application projects, or government policies and program initiatives in one-to- one conversations with other participants at the conference.

PUBLICATIONS

All accepted management or policy papers, research papers, student papers, panels, posters, and system demonstrations will be published in the printed proceedings and included in the ACM digital library and the DBLP bibliography system. Selected papers will be invited for a journal special issue.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

Outstanding achievement awards will be presented in the categories Research papers, Management, Case Study and Policy papers, Posters, and System demonstrations. Papers that reflect the main theme of the conference, Innovations and Transformations in Government, will be preferred. Other selection criteria include the interdisciplinary and innovative nature of the work, its contribution to and balance between theory (rigor) and practice (relevance), the importance and reach of the topic, and the quality of the writing for communicating to a broad audience.